Who is Robert Mercer ... Really?

We interrupt whatever trains of thought this blog has previously been following to report on what is actually happening today in the USA. Donald J. Trump became President of the United States on January 20, 2017 after a so-called election the previous November.

Renaissance Technologies, Inc.

Trump's chief donor, Robert Mercer, began funding him "hugely" after Mercer's original favorite, Ted Cruz, dropped out of the race in July without endorsing the nominee at the Republican convention. Since then, investigative journalists have attempted to learn who this mysterious billionaire really is.

Mercer, "had a short but notable career in computer science [as a] brilliant programmer, [who] had played a significant role in developing early language processing algorithms at IBM," before 1993, when he was hired by the venture capital firm created by his predecessors at Renaissance Technologies. At Renaissance, we are told by Open Secrets, Mercer then "rose through the fund’s ranks, and was appointed co-CEO when Simons retired from the position in 2009."

Thomas Turner Mercer in 1943

Robert Mercer's grandfather was Albert Alexander Mercer, born in Blackburn, Lancashire, England, in 1884. He relocated to British Columbia with his brother, John William Mercer, before 1911, the year Albert met and married Anna Lavinia Rogers, whose American-born parents had settled in Victoria in 1908. After her mother died in 1928, the families began making their way back to the United States, where Anna's brother, Felix A. Rogers, had been working in the lumbering industry at Port Angeles, between Tacoma and Bellingham, Washington. 

Albert, who had been trained in pattern making and foundry work in England, left Victoria for Tacoma, Washington with his wife and children, including Robert's father, Thomas Turner Mercer, then nine years old, who had been born in British Columbia in 1920.


In 1942 Thomas married Virginia Mae Kidd, joined the Army Air Corps at Tacoma, and the following year filed a petition to become a U.S. citizen in Arizona where he was stationed (see inset document to the right and obituary).

After the war, Thomas and Virginia moved to California, where he obtained a bachelor's degree at San Jose State University near Santa Clara, some 30 miles south of Stanford University at Palo Alto. He worked as a bookkeeper for CB Hay Co., a bean threshing manufacturer during his studies at San Jose. 

The title of "health physicist" was listed with his name while he was at the University of Washington at Seattle in 1954, and the address he gave for the directory--4094 Union Bay Circle--takes us on google maps to the Douglas Research Conservatory, which today is within an isolated and fenced-off area of the campus, where the Society for Ecological Restoration meets. That building was named for Howard Douglas, a microbiologist studying the genetics of yeast, who curiously took sabbaticals in Paris in the mid-1950s with another professor, Herschel Roman. to study the effects of yeast. Yeast? As in the yeast that poisoned the village of Pont St. Esprit near Paris in 1951? Hank P. Albarelli Jr. wrote a book about that incident, and others, in which the Central Intelligence Agency has been incriminated:

The same scientists confirmed that following the Pont St. Esprit experiment, Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division returned to New York City in 1956 to conduct experiments under Operations Big City and Mad Hatter. These were covert projects that involved the aerosol spraying of chemicals through the exhaust pipe of an automobile that was driven by CIA and Army scientists around New York City. Prior to this, in 1952 and 1953, smaller experiments were conducted within New York subway cars by George Hunter White, a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent who secretly worked as a contractor for the CIA. On at least two occasions, White detonated specially devised aerosol devices filled with LSD. The CIA destroyed White’s written reports covering these experiments in 1973. [emphasis added]

The Mercers

I italicized the words in the above paragraph to emphasize the fact that Robert Mercer's father, Thomas Turner Mercer, was a graduate student in this department in the same years these "sabbaticals" occurred. Mercer had come to Seattle following his undergraduate studies in biology and chemistry at San Jose State. Once he received his bachelor's degree, Mercer moved to Seattle, where he had a position in this same department until 1955, where he became an expert in the field of aerosol physics!

What is going on here? We are talking about Dr. Thomas Turner Mercer, whose son, Robert (Renaissance Technologies) Mercer, billionaire, has been the largest donor of two different Republican candidates in the last election:

• Ted Cruz, who told us "Climate change is not science. It's religion."
• Donald Trump, now President, who as I write seeks to "slash one of the government's premier climate science agencies by 17 percent."

The Department of Energy has been funding studies on the environment for decades through grants to various universities listed in a 96-page document called "Transfer Abstracts of Fossil Fuel Related Health and Environmental Effects Research Projects (1979)" which includes the University of Washington in Seattle, the University of Rochester where Mercer obtained his PhD and taught, as well as the Lovelace Foundation, where he worked at the time his son Robert was a National Merit Scholarship student at Sandia High School near Albuquerque. Yet these government-funded studies appear to be attempting to transfer the benefits gained into private industry rather than return them back to the taxpayers who paid for the research.

Report written by Dr. Thomas Mercer

Robert Mercer no doubt acquired an interest in this subject from Dr. T. T. Mercer, who spent his career studying aerosol physics as evidenced by the following:

• "A study of some physical properties of an aerosol in relation to airborne decay products of radon" / by Thomas T. Mercer, published in Washington, D.C. by Office of Technical Services, Department of Commerce, 1957, completed: 11/8/56. An additional note states he was paid through a grant from "U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the University of Rochester, administered by the Department of Radiation Biology of the School of Medicine and Dentistry." A research study on the toxicity of radon when inhaled, it was part of his PhD dissertation.
• "Charging and precipitation characteristics of sub-micron particles in the Rohmann electrostatic particle separator," completed: 11/8/56 / by Thomas T. Mercer. Published by the same source in 1957, this study is too complicated for me to even categorize.
• "Atmospheric monitoring for alpha emitters using molecular Filter Membranes," by Thomas T. Mercer - 1/4/54 - involves a research study of uranium and plutonium.
• Similar studies published by Mercer in 1972 and 1973. 
• Thomas T. Mercer Joint Prize of the International Society for Aerosols in Medicine and the American Association for Aerosol Research, for Excellence in Pharmaceutical Aerosols and Inhalable Materials is an annual prize created in 1995. 
• List of additional works by Thomas Mercer and others
• Dated 10/15/53

Stephen K. Bannon

Robert Mercer invested $10 million in Breitbart, according to an anonymous source cited by Bloomberg, which also says Mercer put $11 million into Cruz's campaign. Bloomberg created an instructive chart showing the people and entities Mercer has been supporting, making him the man who has replaced Richard Mellon Scaife as the chief funder of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" machine.

Breitbart recently published a piece by James Delingpole, encouraging Trump to remain steadfast against anyone (the "Green Blob," he calls it) who claims climate change is manmade.

What this leads us to is the project Stephen Bannon worked on for a time in California and Arizona called the Biosphere II, sponsored by Edwin Perry Bass, which we will explore subsequently.